Education Week - October 2, 2019 - 16

OPINION

"

Our emphasis
on speed
in school is
antithetical to
stimulating
meaningful
learning"

By Alden S. Blodget
BLODGET was a high school
teacher and administrator
for 50 years. He is currently a
volunteer tutor at the LEAP
for Education program in
Salem, Mass.

T

It's time to end timed tests

he outrage this year over the attempts of the rich and infamous
to rig the college admissions
process in favor of their children
has focused new attention on
an old issue: purchasing a diagnosis to qualify for extended
time on standardized tests. During my 18 years as
an assistant head of school, from the late '80s to
the early 2000s, the increasing number of students
with psychologists' recommendations for extended
time made me suspicious. While students with real
learning difficulties are legally entitled to a number
of "reasonable accommodations," others seemed
solely interested in being allowed more time on
tests-tests given by classroom teachers and, especially, the SAT and ACT.
A few conversations with a psychologist who
offered families this diagnostic service confirmed
my suspicions that not all of these diagnoses were
legitimate. He explained the complexity and
inexact science of arriving at a diagnosis and spoke
of the pressure from parents whose goal was to
obtain the recommendation for extended time. He
recounted instances when he resisted the pressure,
so the parents procured the recommendation from
someone else.
I began to wonder about the system itself. Why
do we bother with timed tests? Why do we believe
that speed reflects intelligence? As teachers, we see
all sorts of students who work at different speeds,
which produce both intelligent and not-so-intelligent
results.
I taught English, so my tests tended to require
essays or short paragraphs. Annie always aced
them. Ideas seemed to just flow from her pen as she
hunched over her paper. She usually finished early.
Bill also wrote quickly, but he was trying to list all
his thoughts before he actually started organizing
and writing his responses to the essay questions.
At the bell, he was often rushing to finish. Sally was
slow. She tapped her pen on her palm and stared
into space, thinking about what she wanted to say,
searching for that first sentence that was always
so important to get her launched. She produced

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 2 , 2019 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

wonderful essays written outside the classroom, but
her results on timed tests were poor.
Circumstances play a significant role in
performance. Harvard University researchers Kurt
Fischer and Thomas R. Bidell noted in a 2006
paper, "Children (and adults) show distinct levels
of competence under different conditions." Their
research suggests that learning involves a process
of building, regressing, and rebuilding neural skills.
Rather than memorizing facts and procedures,
learning math requires that we build webs of
interrelated skills for math. Understanding the Civil
War means building a conceptual understanding
of the Civil War. At first, these skills for thinking
are fragile, requiring nurturing conditions of high
support.
Typically, in less supportive circumstances
(anxiety over a high-stakes test, being asked to tackle
an unfamiliar problem), the skill collapses (regresses)
and must be rebuilt. Regression actually plays an
essential role in learning. Rebuilding these networks
results in increasing stability. Our obsession with
speed ignores the reality of learning.
Speed is less a sign of intelligence than a sign of the
automaticity that many experts evince, and it seems
nuts to expect young learners to be experts, let alone
experts in the many different fields they are required
to study in school: expert mathematicians, historians,
scientists, writers, readers, linguists, artists. Experts
have developed deep knowledge, understanding, and
experience that can allow at least some of them to
function quickly and intuitively, usually in a particular
field and under certain circumstances. Why would we
expect students to have developed this sort of intuitive
ability?
Neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
and Matthias Faeth explore the development of
"skilled intuition" in young learners-the integration
of "emotional with cognitive knowledge." They
write, that while "students may be slower to build
the full representation of the material, without the
development of sound intuitions undergirding their
representations, it is likely that the students will not
remember the material in the long-term, and that
even if they remember it in an abstract sense, they

Getty

Don't Stop,
Don't Put Down
Your Pencils
will have difficulty applying it to novel situations."
Many tests ask students to do exactly this: quickly
apply to new situations skills and understanding that
they have just begun to develop. They simply aren't
ready. Our emphasis on speed in school is antithetical
to stimulating meaningful learning, the sort of
learning that we claim is the goal of education.
As we ask students to approach a problem, we need
to understand the many factors that can affect the
speed with which they might solve it: How complex
will this student find the problem? How much
experience has that student had with problems like
this one? What's his skill level? How methodical does
she tend to be when working through problems?
How likely is this problem to initiate the collapse
of his fragile understanding of the concept being
tested? What is her stress level? The answers, even if
we could know them, will vary for each student.
Researchers have helped us understand that all
brains are different. A normal brain or an average
brain is a myth. Yet school practices continue to
reflect the myth. Some vague notion of an average
brain sets the expectations for the speed with which
students "ought" to complete a task. The results-the
failures, the mediocre performances, the frustration
felt by both students and teachers-suggest there is
a problem with this approach. As the stakes go up, as
grades and scores determine who will gain entry into
the "best" colleges, desperate people opt to cheat.
In my own classroom, I found a simple solution:
extended time for everyone. The results were
gratifying. Less stress eliminated one major cause
of skill collapse. Students could work at their own
speed-read questions carefully, organize their
thoughts, start again, think. All students could move
through tests at whatever pace was comfortable, and
more students performed well. Most still finished
within the time for which I had designed the test,
but a few stayed an hour or more later (though,
interestingly, not most of the students who qualified
for extended time).
Extending the time for all seems a more
productive approach to establishing equity. Perhaps
it's time for the SAT and ACT to take this small
step-at least until we finally align our approach
to assessment with our growing understanding of
learning and the brain. n
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Education Week - October 2, 2019

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